Who is responsible for GM moths?
July 23, 2015
This is a joint post with Sarah Hartley, Making Science Public Research Fellow What is the role of the public in science? Should public concerns about scientific innovation be taken into account when regulating new technologies? Are some types of concerns more valid than others? These are fundamental questions about the governance of innovation, and the answers …
Making science public: A compilation of blog posts – 2014
December 19, 2014
It is time again for my end of year blog of blog posts. Unbelievably, this is already the third time I am doing this. How time flies! Strange — so far we haven’t had a post about time! This is quite surprising, as otherwise we have had posts about more or less everything under the …
Responsible Research and Innovation InfoHub
September 24, 2014
In parallel with the launch of the new report Responsible Research and Innovation: Responding to a New Research Agenda, this page acts as a focus and reference point for RRI activities across the University of Nottingham. The effective implementation of RRI into research programmes requires scientists and social science practitioners in RRI to be able to …
New report released on Responsible Research and Innovation
Today sees the launch of a new report on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). The report provides an overview of this emerging agenda, lays out approaches from key funders, and summarises RRI work already being carried out within University of Nottingham. The report also presents recommendations for the University’s future engagement with RRI, based on documentary analysis and …
Responsible research and innovation: challenges and opportunities for governance
June 5, 2014
We are delighted to announce a new project, funded by the University of Nottingham’s Bridging the Gaps programme, which will investigate the institution’s approach to Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). RRI has emerged in recent years as a potential bridge between science and society that aims to increase the public value of science. The project …
Moving Responsible Innovation Upstream: GM insects and the exclusion of alternatives
April 4, 2014
‘Responsible innovation’ was the focus of an earlier post by a colleague of mine, Sujatha Raman, who argued that the concept needs to be linked to a range of policy mechanisms to become more ‘policy relevant’. I’d like to explore this idea further. While framed as a concept that has the potential to shape the …
Development interventions need to be more responsive to citizens’ priorities in the global South
April 3, 2014
GUEST POST BY TEMILADE SESAN, UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN The marble plaque commemorating the founding of the primary health centre in Oboto, a peri-urban agrarian community in Ondo state, Nigeria, declares the facility open ‘to the glory of God and the benefit of mankind’. In the decade or so that has elapsed since its opening, the …
‘Energy for All’ and the Challenge of Responding to People’s Needs
April 2, 2014
GUEST POST BY DANIELLE GENT, LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY Meet Doña Maria. She is a mother, housewife, agricultural worker and shop-keeper, who lives with her two daughters in a rural community, located approximately 30 kilometres from Nicaragua’s capital city, Managua. Until recently, she was one of 1.4 billion people on this planet without access to electricity. That …
Making Energy Research More Responsive: Public Dialogue as Experiment
March 31, 2014
The UK Civil Service Reform Plan includes a commitment to embedding systems that are open to a broad range of inputs, including those of the public. Public responsiveness is therefore recognized as a key characteristic of good governance including in the field of science and technology policy-making. Since the influential 2000 ‘Science and Society’ report …
Responsive Research: Which Research? Whose Responsibility?
Over the past couple of months, I have been mulling over why the apparently simple idea of responsive research is so challenging. I began a policy thought-leadership project for Sciencewise-ERC aiming to investigate a key principle, namely, that research should be responsive to public needs and priorities. Admittedly, this definition of ‘responsive research’ is more …